Get exit status of a process in bash

You can simply do a echo $? after executing the command/bash which will output the exit code of the program.

Every command returns an exit status (sometimes referred to as a returnstatus or exit code). A successful command returns a 0, while an unsuccessful one returns a non-zero value that usually can be interpretedas an error code. Well-behaved UNIX commands, programs, and utilities returna 0 exit code upon successful completion, though there are some exceptions.

echo $?    # Non-zero exit status returned -- command failed to execute.echoexit 113   # Will return 113 to shell.           # To verify this, type "echo $?" after script terminates.#  By convention, an 'exit 0' indicates success,#+ while a non-zero exit value means an error or anomalous condition.

Alternately if you wish to identify return code for a background process/script (started with nohup or run in background & operator) you could get the pid of the process/script started and wait for it to terminate and then get the exit code.

$ ./foo.sh &[1] 28992          # Some random number for the process-id$ echo $!          # Get process id of the background process28992 $ wait 28992       # Waits until the process determined by the number is complete[1]+  Done         ./foo.sh$ echo $?          # Prints the return code of the process0

More info @ http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exit-status.html

You are approaching this wrong-- system() already returns the exist status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. What is likely happening is your "Test" script is written incorrectly or you are testing "status" incorrectly. I've seen the following scripting mistakes from developers.

run_some_javaecho "Done"

At no time are they tracking the exit code, the script returns the last exit code-- of the echo command. Which makes it always successful. Here are two ways of exiting correctly (and I know other coders thing some more advanced ways are better than this first one, but I don't think that's what this thread is about). Crawl, then walk, then run.

If you need the exit status, but want all the shell commands to execute.

return_code=0mv $letters $ARCHIVEreturn_code=$(($return_code + $?))mv $letters $ARCHIVEreturn_code=$(($return_code + $?))exit $return_code

If you want to exit on the failure, there is set -e to look into, and here is another way.

mv $letters $ARCHIVE || exit 1mv $letters $ARCHIVE || exit 2